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Quote notes (#41)

Europe’s social engineers of the last generation seem to have assumed that the “dark forces” of nationalism and chauvinism had been left behind. That was partly true; the horrors of the two world wars have made many (though far from all) Europeans unwilling to fight anymore on ethnic grounds. But the subsidence of ethnic nationalism in European politics was also a function of the mass ethnic cleansings and genocidal killings that left most European nation states fairly homogenous. There was no “German Question” in Polish or Czech politics because there were no more Germans in these countries. The “Jewish Question” largely faded in postwar Europe, in part because of revulsion against Nazism, but also because the Jews were gone. Europe’s architects liked to believe that Europeans had transcended ethnic hatred, but much of Europe’s postwar peace came from the success of ethnic hatred in creating homogenous countries.

Such tragic incidents are precisely why the work of the Institute for Research into Superdiversity is so vital.

“Without the efforts of … “dominant” communities and institutions to adapt and evolve in light of increased diversity, migrants may follow a pathway to separation or marginalisation and therein experience psychosocial stresses or social exclusion. Recent analyses … by staff at our Institute for Research into Superdiversity … have demonstrated clearly that for refugees at least there is a strong connection between feeling unwelcome or experiencing harassment and ill health. These findings provide robust and reliable statistics that support earlier qualitative work … where migrants have told us that they are too frightened to mix with local residents because they are aware of anti-migrant or anti-refugee sentiment … “

The cathedral hates the stock market, hates private economic activity, and hates any sort of privately-owned capital. (The cathedral is socialistically inclined by necessity – it produces nothing saleable, so it is parasitic by nature.)

The cathedral’s feigned concern for economic recovery (in this case, through immigration) is just a cynical attempt to justify what they want (more immigrants) by couching it in terms that appeal to non-cathedralists (economic recovery).

Walter Russell Mead, the man who thinks the Anglosphere can only go from strength-to-strength. In my younger, more innocent days I read his British Empire triumphalist histories with great pleasure. Instapundit is entirely bamboozled by him, and Mead one of the primary obsticles impeding Instapundit’s slow drift to neo-reaction.

It’s too bad WRM can’t apply this logic a mere twenty-three years forward from 1945, to Enoch Powell’s famous River’s of Blood speech.

There’s a weird way in which WRM and Moldbug are polarized, dizygotic twins, or an even more extreme dual entity, like the two strands of a DNA molecule. The Anglosphere’s exceptional geopolitical destiny, rooted in revolutionary ultra-protestantism, is the same core theme of both. The point of fission doesn’t seem to have much to do with substantial historical interpretation, but only with the values ascribed to the process, and the forecast as to its sustainability.

Given some of the emerging deep cultural arguments among Dark Enlightenment writers, it’s at least intriguing that — whilst both WRM and Moldbug represent remarkably subtle modes of attachment / response to the Christian tradition — it is WRM who binds an enduring religious faith to political optimism (and Moldbug who ironizes both).

It’s been awhile, but I think in the book God and Gold, WRM actually titles a chapter as “Protocols of the Elders of Greenwich”. I thought nothing of it then, but I would have been floored if I read it today.

You’re absolutely right that both Moldbug and WRM see Anglo-exceptionalism as a product of some kind of capitalist-puritanism. If memory serves correctly, he approvingly quotes Voltaire, who woefully observes that French patriotic ardor was soundly beaten by the bloodless efficiency of British finance. Voltaire lamented that even as they executed kings and insufficently enthusiastic admirals with alarming regularity, the British never failed to pay their debts on time.

This is the closest WRM gets to a realization of the Cathedral. The important differences are that WRM does not see the Cathedral as Orwellian. He believes it is staffed with true believers of missionary zeal. The second difference is that he has no conception of race-realism, and this is his greater flaw. He may be right in tracing the ascendency of the Anglos, from Elizabeth and Drake onwards, to Cathedral machinery he describes. But this model of human freedom, expansion, and success could only be sustained when confined to northern European Protestants. Since then, the continued expansion of the Anglosphere has begun to rot away its core. WRM doesn’t see that the formula which argubly worked very well for the first 350 years has not worked at all in the last 100. WRM is still a giddy triumphalist, when he should be very worried indeed.